As part of its privacy initiative, this week Google began phasing out third-party cookies with the test of a new Chrome browser feature called Tracking Protection. When activated, the new feature limits cross-site tracking by restricting website access to cookies. Google is making Tracking Protection available to 1% of randomly-selected Chrome users globally during the test.

Google gave the industry a multi-year lead time to enable advertisers and agencies to find new privacy safe options for audience targeting before it began to block cookies. The company expects to phase out cookies for everyone by Q3 of this year.

“We’ve been testing new targeting methods as they have been introduced by the ad tech providers/partners over the last two years,” says Robin LeGassicke, managing director, digital for Cairns Oneil. “In addition, as an industry, we have all been advising clients to build up privacy and permission-based first party data pools to be able to use them for targeting purposes. First-party data sources are key, but scaling to find new audiences will be more difficult without third-party cookies. The challenge is there is no real replacement to the third-party cookie. There are many alternate solutions.”

LeGassicke says Cairns Oneil’s primary solution is Adform’s ID Fusion, which works as a universal translator, finding users behind a variety of emerging first-party IDs on the market. She says this provides clients with incremental reach and performance gains on their campaigns without cookies. The agency also uses Google’s Topics, which groups users into broad interest categories and has been testing these and many other potential methods for quite some time.

Thursday’s launch of Tracking Protection only affects about 1% of Chrome users and Google will continue migrating users into the Google Privacy Sandbox, the company’s privacy-friendly approach to targeting and measurement launched in September 2023. The Sandbox initiative was designed to support online privacy by preventing covert tracking, fighting spam and fraud, and by enabling secure storing and sharing of data.

“If your media buying world is entirely digital, then [Tracking Protection and Privacy Sandbox] seem like big issues,” says Chris Williams, chief marketing officer for Arima Data. “But, if you operate at the more strategic cross-media level, nothing changes, media evaluation remains with Marketing Mix Modelling. Your target is still your target as you try to sort out reach and frequency across all media and you are still stuck with trying to align panel and user level campaign data for targeting and delivery. I think we are going to see some very interesting movement on this last item in the coming year.”